Pro-Iranian Shia forces in Afghanistan have launched a threepronged offensive against the Taliban in the central town of Bamiyan, which the Islamic militia captured four days ago, Iranian television reported yesterday.
The report, quoting a spokesman of the Hezb-i-Wahdat faction, said the Shia militia and its allied forces were stationed on the Kuh-Baba heights surrounding the city and had besieged Bamiyan from three directions.
"The Taliban positions have come under heavy fire from the alliance forces," it said.
The report also spoke of clashes in Bamiyan, which fell to Taliban forces on Sunday, after "the arrival of auxiliary Wahdat forces", and said "a number of Taliban and Pakistani commanders had been killed or wounded".
It also charged that the Taliban militia "continues to massacre people in Bamiyan and has set fire to dozens of homes". Iran's supreme leader, Aya tollah Ali Khamenei, has accused Pakistan's air force of taking part in the "massacre" of Shia Muslim ethnic Hazaris in Bamiyan, a charge denied by Islamabad.
UN sources in Islamabad also said yesterday that anti-Taliban forces have staged a series of counterattacks around Bamiyan and have recaptured the local airstrip.
The Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, called on Iran yesterday to resolve their differences peacefully after Teh ran ordered its forces to prepare for action against the hardline Islamic militia.
In Tehran, Iranian officials said yesterday that two diplomats among 11 Iranians who went missing in northern Afghanistan last month had returned home.
"Two - out of the 11 Iranian diplomats and a reporter present at Iran's consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan - who managed to escape the country, have now returned to Iran," sources at the Foreign Ministry said.
One diplomat, Mr Hussein Akbari, who was not at the Iranian consulate when Taliban forces seized it on August 8th, returned to Iran via Bamiyan, according to the ministry.
The second diplomat, identified as Mr Allah-dad Shahsavan, was shot by the Taliban, but managed to escape and returned home after being treated by some Afghan nationals.
The remains of seven other Iranians, including a journalist, were returned home on Monday, while two other bodies were left in Afghanistan.
Tension between Iran and Afghanistan has risen over the fate of the diplomats, with a war of words being exchanged between Tehran and Kabul and the buildup of large numbers of Iranian troops on the Afghan border.
US and Iranian representatives are preparing to meet in New York to discuss Afghanistan in the highest-level meeting of officials from the two countries since the 1979 hostage crisis, diplomats in Washington said yesterday. The ministerial meeting, planned for Monday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, would also include officials from Afghanistan's other neighbours.